The following appeared in the Providence Journal (RI), the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, and the Journal Inquirer in Manchester CT:

President Obama’s demand for an unconditional and immediate cease-fire in the fighting between Israel and Hamas, which would leave the latter with the wherewithal to murder Israeli civilians in the future, is just the most recent example of what can only be considered a conscious and deliberate policy to weaken and to undermine the security of the only Jewish state in the world.

From denying Israel the “bunker-buster” bombs it needs to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities, to infantile snubs of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president of the United States has shown an unswerving, consistent and relentless hostility to Israel that is not only harmful to Israel but to America as well.

Theological fanatics like Hamas will not be kindly disposed to the United States, much less deterred from continuing their genocidal war against Israel, by Obama’s ongoing appeasement, which has been justified and explained away by the president’s ridiculous claim, first made in his speech in Cairo in 2009, to understand Islam because he lived as a youth in a Muslim country, Indonesia.

Every public and semi-public admonishment of Israel, whether by President Obama or by his loquacious secretary of state, John Kerry, only encourages those who seek Israel’s destruction to persist in their evil design: Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and, by seeking to flood Israel with “refugees” too young to have been alive when Israel was created in 1948, the Palestinian Authority.

One may disagree about the reason for the president’s attitude. The most plausible is not that he is secretly Muslim, but rather that he loathes Israel because he loathes America, that for Obama the former is an integral appendage of the latter, no less racist and discriminatory at home and just as imperialist and expansionist abroad. Ironically, the Iranians show they also believe in this connection by building intercontinental missiles to fire at “The Big Satan” (the United States) once “The Little Satan” (Israel) is destroyed.

In light of the multiple dangers Israel faces, even as it is currently dealing, at great cost in human life, with an enemy that seeks the destruction not only of Israel but, as its founding charter makes clear, of all Jews, it is time for American Jews to recognize that the current occupant of the White House means real and lasting harm to the state of the Jewish people and thus to the Jewish people themselves.

If American Jews who support Obama’s positions on domestic issues such as abortion and immigration consider these issues more important than Israel’s survival, then they should continue to support his presidency. But for American Jews who both as Jews and as Americans consider Israel’s survival the foremost moral imperative of our time, and who believe that without Israel Judaism itself will suffer demographic extinction and that America would be even more tempting a target for Muslim terrorists than it was before 9/11, their obligation is clear and inescapable: to do everything they can to pressure President Obama to cease his relentless hostility to Israel and, if that does not work, to seek his removal from office. Impeachment and conviction do not require the commission of crimes. Dereliction of duty is sufficient.

The foreign policy Obama has pursued, of punishing America’s allies, not just Israel but other pro-Western democracies such as Poland and the Czech Republic, and of appeasing America’s enemies, not just Muslim theocracies but also thuggish dictatorships such as Putin’s Russia, is clear evidence of presidential negligence, of failing to do everything necessary to protect the American people. If this is not an impeachable offense, one is hard pressed to say what is.

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Jay Bergman is Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University.